Scaling API-first – The story of a global engineering organization
The tale of the file formats
1. The Tale of the Two File
Formats
Once upon a time Microsoft
created the Office Suite
Everyone loved it and Microsoft
made lots of money
2. Office File Looked Like This
Proprietary, closed format that
can only be opened with
appropriate Microsoft office format
3. It was a good business
decision
If someone wanted to create Office
files they had to buy a copy
Same for people who just wanted to
read and/or print these files
5. Some people got nervous
Very important people used office to
create very important documents
They worried:
What if Microsoft
goes out of
business?
6. All of a sudden…
Bunch of people got together to resolve this
problem (it was a problem!)
They created an absolutely free, open
document standard called Open Document
Format (ODF)
All competitive office productivity suites such as
Open Office, Star Office and etc Switched to
ODF
7. It looked like this:
Human readable
Very well documented
8. VIPS Were Impressed
Many politicians, government officials and
even many business owners were impressed
ODF documents can be opened by dozens of
different apps made by different companies
They decided to ditch Microsoft Office
10. So he made new office format
He called it Office Open XML
(OOXML)
It looked like this inside
11. Sort of open…
The new format is sort of open
Anyone can create an app that reads
or creates .docx and .xlsx
Provided they read the
documentation…
12. VIPS Forgot about ODF
Microsoft continues to make money
On the other hand users must deal
with the format confusion for few years
now…
